Efficiency: The Energy Transition’s Other Story

By Jonathan Gorvett

934 worlds - 3 mins read

Efficiency: The Energy Transition’s Other Story

Since 15 March 2023, Dubai’s hotels have had a new obligation to meet if they are to pass the emirate’s already-high hospitality standards: a monthly energy audit.

Each establishment now has to report its carbon footprint to the Department of Economy and Tourism, with this measured according to nine criteria: electricity and water usage; district cooling; use of liquefied petroleum gas; the amount of landfill waste produced; the amount of waste recycled; and the amounts of petrol, diesel and refrigerants consumed.

A good score wins incentives, a poor one prompts penalties.

With buildings responsible for around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and the UAE building sector responsible for around 1 million tonnes of CO2 (MTCO2) annually, such schemes clearly target a key industry, if energy transition is to be a success.

The UAE’s authorities have recognised this for some time now, too.

Since 2014, all new public and private buildings in the UAE have had to meet mandatory green building regulations, with these continuously tightened and updated.

More is still to come, too, because, as Thomas Götz, co-head of the Energy Policy Research Unit at the Wuppertal Institute, told Everose: “Every kilowatt of power you don’t have to use is a kilowatt of energy either saved, or that can be used for something really necessary.”

Those efficiencies can be made all along the energy consumption chain, from hotel lighting to power grid flexibility. Assisting in all of this is a single development: digitalisation.

Smart metering of hotel lights, for example, enables accurate real-time measurement of power consumption, which can be reported along with other data to enable far more accurate demand-side management for energy producers.

This data can also return data back to hotel managers via digital applications to enable them to make more efficient choices – for example, to switch off lights remotely, charge and use appliances at off-peak times, and adjust room thermostats and air conditioning units.

Data can help administrators figure out ways to reorganise work practices to take advantage of energy efficiencies, and it can also be used to identify parts of a building that need better insulation or retrofitting.

When demand-side management data is combined with supply side, this also helps producers and power authorities do something crucial: balance and stabilise the grid.

This addresses a particular challenge during the energy transition, when electricity production becomes increasingly decentralised and based on variable renewable energy – principally solar and wind power.

What a Waste

An additional component to energy efficiency is increasingly being added now: repairability. This is crucial to the circular economy and also applies across the whole spectrum of economic activity.

For example, that figure of 1MTCO2 for the UAE building sector’s carbon footprint mentioned above breaks down into 65% operational carbon and 35% embodied carbon over the average lifetime of a building.

Extending a building’s lifetime can therefore also be a way to reduce its carbon footprint, boosting its overall efficiency. First of all, this means designing buildings and using building materials that are not only sustainably sourced, but that also do not deteriorate rapidly in extreme climates, such as the UAE’s.

Secondly, it means designing and installing building systems that can be easily repaired, and digitalisation has a key role here, too.

Remote sensors can alert building owners to problems at an early stage, enabling repair before those issues become larger and more expensive to fix.

Smart sensors can also enable predictive maintenance, cutting down operation and maintenance costs not only in buildings, but also in energy systems overall. Examples of this could range from detecting stresses in a wind turbine blade to alerting operators to an overheating transmission cable.

Repairability also means redesigning many household and commercial electronic appliances so that the current practice of replacing a device completely when it malfunctions becomes much less widespread.

“Extending lifetimes adds greatly to efficiency,” says Götz, noting that the EU is currently debating laws strengthening the ‘right to repair’ for electronic items in particular.

This comes after organisations such as the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Forum estimated that ‘e-waste’ – broken and unused electronic equipment – accounted for around 60m tonnes of waste in 2021, a figure that is growing annually by around 3-4%.

Repair of this equipment would represent a significant new energy efficiency. Recycling of parts would also help in tackling the growing critical minerals challenge, as electronic devices contain a wide variety of rare earths, copper, nickel, lithium and other critical metals.

The EU proposals would mean, among other approaches, the clear labelling of devices with a graded ‘repairability’, as well as an end to monopolies on repair such as that currently exercised in many countries by Apple.

While such regulation is currently not on the agenda in the Gulf, it may well be a portent of things to come.

In future too, companies, governments and corporations may also have to look not only at waste electronic equipment, but also at ‘waste data’.

Currently, only around 5% of the data in storage centres is still in use more than 90 days after it is first stored, with the remaining 95% continuing to soak up energy, yet unused.

This issue is likely to become more acute, too, as the amount of data required by digitalisation – including for many of the energy efficiency purposes listed above – means data centres increasing exponentially in size and number. Managing this expansion without undermining efforts to save energy elsewhere will be critical if net gains are to be made.

Energy efficiency is thus a multifaceted part of the energy transition, highlighting how the uses of energy impact every part of society and the economy – and often in unexpected ways.